Well-known actress Behnaz Jafari is distraught by a provincial girl’s video plea for help – oppressed by her family forbidding her to pursue her studies at the Tehran drama conservatory. Behnaz abandons her shoot and turns to filmmaker Jafar Panahi to help solve the mystery of the young girl’s troubles. They travel by car to the rural northwest where they have amusing encounters with the charming folk of the girl’s mountain village. But the city visitors soon discover that the protection of age-old traditions is as generous as local hospitality…
"Social networks are extremely popular in Iran. There is a mad quest for contact, especially with film celebrities. Despite his position as a director officially forbidden in his own country, Jafar Panahi remains a very popular recipient of messages, many from young people who want to make films. /.../ One day, he received a message on Instagram that raised a concern, and during the same period the newspapers wrote about a young girl who had committed suicide because she had been banned from making movies. This made him imagine receiving a video of this suicide by social media, and he wondered how he would react to that." (Jean-Michel Frodon)
Jafar Panahi
Born in 1960, in Mianeh, Iran, Panahi studied direction before starting his career as a documentarian and assistant to Abbas Kiarostami. His debut feature, The White Balloon, won the Camera d’Or for Best First Feature Film at Cannes. Though a highly appreciated Iranian director in the West, Panahi continues to endure severe persecution in his homeland. In 2010 the Iranian authorities issued Panahi with a twenty-year ban on filmmaking.